Will we ever tire of the Henrys? There’s The Tudors on TV, new books about Henry VIII and his various wives appear all the time (the latest is “The Sisters Who Would Be Queen” by Leane de Lisle), and now we’ve got England’s prestigious Man Book Prize for Literature awarded to Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” yet another fictional treatment of those naughty, wacky Tudors.
Yes, we all loved Philippa Gregory’s “The Other Boleyn Girl,” and we saw it, too, made into a movie starring those starlets of the moment (is that a tautology?) Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. I resisted Gregory’s books for several years, convinced that they were just fatter versions of bad historical romances. When I finally gave in and read “Boleyn Girl,” I was delighted to find that it’s packed with earthy detail and devilishly human machinations.
But — and this is going to be a big “but” for Gregory fans reading this post — “The Other Boleyn Gril” still centered on the top level of Tudor life: King, Queen, and courtiers. It’s a different version of their lives than we’ve read in other novels and biographies, but it’s still all about those naughty wacky Tudors. I’ve been reading about the same characters for decades, now.
That’s why I’m going to tell you to read “Wolf Hall,” not “The Other Boleyn Girl” — although truly, I’m cheating this week, since I actually encourage you to read both. But if you’re only going to pick up one historical novel this year, let it be Mantel’s complex, and fascinating novel about Thomas Cromwell, for eight years King Henry VIII’s chief advisor and a powerful ally of the Reformation movement.
Here’s the thing: So often literary types claim that women write “domestic” novels about “female” things while men write “big” novels about “political” things. Ha! I say: Both of these writers are women, yet they couldn’t have written more disparate books. While Gregory is in the “domestic” camp, Mantel is in the “political” camp. Or is she? “Wolf Hall” begins with Cromwell’s quite miserable childhood/adolescent torments at the hands of his volatile father, and continues to show the domestic side of a man’s life by contrasting Cromwell’s strong, loving marriage and benevolent parenting style with his monarch’s many brief unions and fitful attention to children.
In “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel constructs a novel about big, historical events and shows the domestic drama and detail behind them in a way that feels richer and newer than any other book about the period I’ve read over the past couple of decades.
